4 black schools in Polk funded in part by Sears co-owner

Saturday

Feb 9, 2019 at 5:11 PMFeb 11, 2019 at 5:44 AM

Bartow, Winter Haven, Haines City and Lake Alfred all had black schools that received funding from Sears co-owner Julius Rosenwald.

BARTOW — Charles Luster, 77, walked through the African-American Heritage Museum that he and his brother opened in 2014, gently tapping photographs of family members, retired military service members, professional athletes and former classmates from Union Academy, the school in Bartow that educated black students from in town, Mulberry, Fort Meade and even Plant City.

“It was a place of high education,” Luster remembered. “A no-nonsense school. Everything was stressed that we graduate and go out in the world and get a job.”

The original Union Academy, founded in 1897, started as a kindergarten through 8th grade school — with no opportunity for local black children to go any farther — until 1923, when the school added high school grades. Lela Burkett became Polk County's first black high school graduate. Erika Burkell Glover was the first person to graduate after having attended all 12 grades at Union. She received her diploma in 1928.

In 1929, Sears, Roebuck and Company co-owner Julius Rosenwald fronted $2,600 to help build a bigger school, with room for 17 teachers and about 250 students, who would take classes all the way through the 12th grade. Public tax dollars contributed another $40,156 to build the brick and mortar, one-story building with a cupola capping it off. Black businessman Jackson C. Longworth donated the five acres on which the school still stands today on Wabash Street, across from the municipal golf course.

History of Rosenwald schools

Nearly forgotten now, more than 5,300 Rosenwald schools, libraries, teachers' homes and shops were built across the United States to educate black children, including 120 schools in Florida and four schools in Polk County:

• Union Academy in Bartow, now Union Academy Middle Magnet School, the only one of the schools still standing.

• Florence Villa Training School — the first one was burned down and a second was built.

• Oakland School in Haines City.

• Fruitlands Institute in Lake Alfred.

According to The National Trust for Historic Preservation, Rosenwald and his family created the Rosenwald Fund in 1917 and by 1948 gave out $70 million for the education of black children and to help several Jewish charities. Rosenwald worked with Booker T. Washington, who founded what eventually became Tuskegee University in Alabama, to design school buildings and encourage local communities to provide the remainder of any needed funding.

Several designs were drawn up for small buildings and larger schools, all of them making ample use of large windows to let in natural light because many areas were poor or rural and didn't have or could not afford electricity. Most buildings were clapboard, but a few, like Union Academy, were made of brick.

“There was a definite need for rural schools in the South after Reconstruction,” which ended in 1877, according to a February 2018 article in Polk Proud History, a publication of the Polk County Historical Association. “African American children might learn their ABCs in churches, private residences, above stores or even under shade trees. Some children were fortunate enough to have an actual school building. However, their 'school' was little more than a one-room shack with very bad lighting and a leaky roof. School supplies and fixtures were almost nonexistent. Washington believed he could remedy the situation with the help of a northern philanthropist.”

Today, only about 10-12 percent of the schools remain and are some of the most threatened historic buildings in America, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The schools — and providing education for black children — were not without controversy or hardship during the Jim Crow era, when blacks were kept separate from whites by the power of law in areas of civic life. In Polk County, a Winter Haven construction company was given the contract to build Union Academy, but the project had to be rebid because the builder failed to post a required bond with the school district or start construction — holding up the process for months, possibly on purpose. It was a tactic common during segregation.

Florence Villa Training School

According to an historic marker, the first black school in Winter Haven, the Florence Villa Training School at the corner of Second and Palmetto streets, was built in 1916, but was in disrepair by 1922. Classes were moved to the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church until something could be done.

Local white doctor Mary Jewett donated five acres on Avenue O, near Seventh Avenue Northeast, to build the first Rosenwald School in Polk County, with construction starting in 1924. White residents donated $11,000, property taxes paid for $5,000, black residents gave $2,000 and the Rosenwald Fund gave $1,500.

The school opened on December 1, 1924, and contained six large classrooms, a domestic science department and an auditorium. The school served 250 students. Just six weeks later, fire swept through the building, burning it to the ground. The arsonist was never found, despite the Florence Villa town council offering a $500 reward. A second Rosenwald school, farther to the north, was built and opened the following year.

The original property was returned to Jewett and remains vacant.

The second Florence Villa Training School had students from Florence Villa, as well as the Pughsville neighborhood, according to archives held at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

“This community acted as any fully functional community should, although perhaps not the most well off socioeconomically,” the Fisk website reads. “Many residents of Pughsville worked in the citrus industry; however, many others functioned as shop-owners, business professionals, and educators.”

Luster said working for the railroad, in agriculture, domestic service, cutting sugar cane, gathering turpentine and picking fruits were some of the few jobs available to blacks up until the late 1960s and early 1970s during the Jim Crow era.

“Most of the educated students who couldn't get a good job went to work for the mines or cut cane,” Luster said. He added that he tried his hand at citrus picking before going to work at Polk General Hospital as a custodian. “I thought I was a man 'til I went out there,” Luster said of the orange groves.

He eventually rose in the ranks at the hospital to become the first black manager, overseeing housekeepers and safety.

Oakland School in Haines City

Nearly $17,200 in taxpayer funds and $1,400 from the Rosenwald Fund helped to build the six-classroom, clapboard Oakland School in Haines City. Students came from Loughman, Davenport, Lake Hamilton and Dundee to attend classes.

“There's quite a few medical doctors and PhD's come out of there — underfunded and everything,” 1964 graduate Dolph Howard told The Ledger in December.

Like Polk's three other Rosenwald schools, Oakland School provided the usual school activities like athletics, theater and a marching band, along with a gospel band. Students would hold chicken and fish fries to raise money for things like marching band uniforms or theater costumes. During school hours, both boys and girls took shop, home economics, typing and driver's education.

Fruitlands Institute in Lake Alfred

The Fruitlands Institute in Lake Alfred was the smallest of the Rosenwald schools built in Polk County. It housed two classrooms and was built during the 1928-29 school year with $600 from black donors, $350 from white donors, $1,836 from taxes and $500 from the Rosenwald Fund. It was built at 700 N. Third Street. An historic marker was placed by the property last June.

According to the marker, the school was named for the citrus company that donated the land for the school.

“This school exemplifies the ideal Rosenwald school,” Fisk's website states. They “were meant to form the center of a functioning community as well as a school building. Rosenwald schools typically had windows on only one wall of each classroom so the other three walls could be used as chalkboards. In this way, the Rosenwald design minimized costs and maximized efficiency and quality.”

The Rosenwald Fund required that each school must be built on at least two acres of land to provide space for a well, outhouses, garden and playground.

Integration

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court struck down segregation, forcing blacks and whites to attend school together. It took another 15 years for integration to arrive in Polk County.

In 1963, Herman Henry Mills Jr. sued the “Board of Public Instruction of Polk County” to “eradicate the dual system” when it was discovered that the school district was building smaller schools for more students in black neighborhoods compared to white schools.

District Court Judge Joseph Lieb in Tampa ruled in October 1968 that Polk County should “effectuate a transition to a racially non-discriminatory school system.”

Although Rosenwald students liked their schools, many favored integration because white schools had resources they simply did not: new books, new furniture, new lab equipment. Luster said his books at Union Academy had previously been used by white students at nearby and famous Summerlin Institute.

“My math book, half the pages would be torn out, but the other half had the right answers,” Luster said. “When we took the SAT, we were behind a year and that was a disadvantage."

He described their segregated lives as being in a square box with no windows to the outside world.

“When we were getting out of the square, we were exposed to other people and other ideas and it allowed us to grow,” he said.

When integration took place in 1969 in Polk County, Union Academy became a seventh grade school and was renamed Golfview Junior High. The name was changed back in 1975 after alumni of Union Academy petitioned the school board. In 1992, it became a magnet school.

In 1965, Charles Richardson, along with about 30 other students, transferred from Union Academy to Summerlin Institute, now Bartow High School. Richardson went on to become Polk County's first black county commissioner and a mayor of Winter Haven. Other graduates of Union Academy include high-ranking military personnel, professional athletes and civic leaders.

The other three schools have been torn down.

Luster said living under Jim Crow laws instituted fear in the black community — fear of being caught out after dark, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing to a white person and fear of being lynched.

“As we grew and had our own children, it kind of erased that,” Luster said. “Knowledge is power.”

Kimberly C. Moore can be reached at kmoore@theledger.com or 863-802-7514. Follow her on Twitter at @KMooreTheLedger.

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